Charles Bovary is Emma's husband, a provincial health officer, good and devoted, whom his wife considers mediocre, who loves her without understanding her, and who discovers her lovers only after she dies.
He meets Emma while still married to an older widow, when he sets the broken leg of her father, old Rouault, who afterward sends him a turkey every year "in memory of the leg cured"; widowed, he marries Emma. In Yonville, patients do not come, and his wife's dowry is exhausted within two years. His neighbor Homais convinces him to operate on the club foot of the stable boy Hippolyte; the leg gangrenes and Doctor Canivet amputates it. Before her humiliated husband, Emma feels the shame of having imagined "that such a man could have any value."
His devotion runs through the book. "For forty-three days Charles did not leave her side for a moment," during the fever that follows Rodolphe's abandonment. He signs the powers of attorney that hand Emma the management of the property and, for the first time, takes his wife's side against his own mother. Once Emma is dead, he wants to bury her in her wedding dress, sinks into the debts she left, and writes, in the congratulations on Léon's marriage, "How happy my poor wife would have been!" When he meets Rodolphe, he does not accuse him: he says "It was the fault of fate!", almost the same phrase as in the letter of rupture he had found in the attic, and dies the next day.
The novel gives Charles the most constant love and the least capacity to say it, and it is this love that Emma does not see. He does not calculate, and it is the calculation of others that ruins him.